The UX of Religious Traditions
As I continue the IXDMA program here at CU, I’m becoming increasingly immersed in design thinking. In my past life as a mechanical engineer, my design focus was more narrow — just material objects. Now I’m applying that same design thinking to a much wider scope of phenomenon, and I’m reminded of the fascinating interplay of UX design with all facets of our lives.
I had a mostly cynical view towards religion when I was younger — raised by my secular and atheist-leaning parents, I largely adopted their philosophical attitudes as many children do. But as I grew older, and especially once I went to college, my cynicism turned to curiosity, which developed into an intense fascination, before culminating in a completely new philosophical perspective.
Because I spend so much of my free time thinking and reading about metaphysical or religious topics, I’ve begun to see the very interesting UX elements present in various traditions.
The design of cathedrals could be it’s own post alone, so I’ll just touch on a couple of cool things.
First, the huge interiors and buttressed arch style of Gothic cathedrals creates an auditory sustain much longer than most interior spaces, giving a powerful and commanding effect to the priest’s voice. The power behind the voice would induce a much stronger emotional response to the content. You can see this used to a really incredible effect whenever they hold a concert in an old cathedral, especially the chanting of monks.
Stained glass windows create a dynamic, almost hallucinatory lighting effect, blurring the spiritual and material worlds. The images also served the functional purpose of communicating Biblical stories to an often illiterate or barely-literate congregation.
The ancient Greek/Cretian hypogeum, a type of underground temple whose entire purpose we are not sure about (maybe funerals?) was discovered in recent decades to have an especially interesting effect — the human voice was acoustically manipulated through levels of reverberating chambers to create an altered state of mind, literally, in the listener.
Scientists recorded the signals and when played back they were found to induce a delta wave state in the brain — a frequency found by neurobiologists to be correlated with ecstatic and transcendental experiences that people have experienced while connected to EEG monitoring equipment.
In Tibetan Buddhism, every single visual element, from tapestries to clothing to artwork, is designed to awaken the viewer out of the dream that is material reality, into a state of comprehensive awareness and compassion.
This is accomplished by the use of symbols, said not to be conceived by human minds, but present in the fabric of the universe, like the waveform of an atom.
The artwork of Tibetan thangkas follow strict rules for geometric relationships between all the forms on the canvas. According to the Buddhist sutras, there are mathematical relationships between all the elements of an enlightened beings’ body — the length of the limbs, the space between the eyes, the proportion of shoulders to hips, etc.
It is believed that by simply viewing these mathematically perfect representations of an enlightened being, elements deep within your conscious mind are stirred, and you are pulled towards a revelation of your own true nature.
In Islamic artwork, iconographic representation are forbidden. So, artists through the centuries have manipulated both typographic forms and geometric patterns instead, to inspire the viewer and create a sense of the infinite that they can use to conceive of and connect to Allah.
This was a brief survey of the most striking examples that came to my mind, but now that I’m paying more attention, it’s fascinating to me just how rich and deep the design elements of many different traditions are, and it’s definitely something that I’ll be exploring more in the future.
